Never Too Late To Know

Truman Capote on the David Frost Show

Frost: What do you believe in the strongest?

Capote: Art

Frost: Anything else?

Capote: Friendship. Actually, I think friendship and love are exactly the same thing.

Frost: How do you mean?

Capote: Obviously, sex is not love. It's a temporary situation, isn't it? Sex can lead to love, but friendship inevitably leads to love. There can't be any friendship unless it's a real friendship, but then, one doesn't have that many friends in a lifetime.

Frost: Have you ever been in love?

Capote: Oh, yes.

Frost: Often?

Capote: No. Twice.

Frost: And was it just like heightened friendship then?

Capote: Yes.

Frost: Heightened in what way?

Capote: Well, I didn't have to finish sentences.

Frost: That's a great definition. But if friendship leads to love, does it normally lead to sex too?

Capote: No.

Frost: You don't seem to have a very high opinion of sex.

Capote: Well, that's not true either. I just don't see in what connection this really falls, because you see I don't think sex has anything to do with friendship. It's very difficult to have a sort of sexual relationship with somebody who actually is a friend because there is a kind of tension and antagonism that goes on in a sexual relationship that's the antithesis of friendship. Friendship is the perfect sort of trust and belief in not lying to one another. People who are living a love-sex relationship are continually lying to one another because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means you editorialize about them. You know? You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you are building a lie. But in a friendship you don't do that. You do exactly the reverse. You try more and more to be as completely pure and straight as you can be.

Photo location: Top: Bang Saphan Noi, Prachuabkhirikan province. Bottom: Baan Hintoom, Uthaitani province.